http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

This article indicates there are several problems - could this be because it was rushed out to stop IE7 getting too much of a march?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/28/2115202&from=rss

http://listvine.com/2006/10/25/9-reasons-not-to-upgrade-to-firefox-20/

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Good review/comparison of IE7 from a Firefox user

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/24/1836218&from=rss

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

But ignore the dodgy emails

http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/008427.html

One of the options after installing was enabling ClearType for Internet Explorer

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartypeInfo.mspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/03/524367.aspx

Cleartype tuner is here (applies to XP rather than browser)

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx

UPDATE: It appears that there may be a vulnerability!!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/ie7_first_bug/

http://secunia.com/advisories/22477/

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

although ftp still isn't working properly. This could be an installation issue as discussed previously

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,97bf7bc6-4e3d-4183-b499-9a6303d2d059.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

I downloaded this as I was struggling to upload data to an ftp site with IE7 Beta 2. IE7 Beta 3 is slightly better in this respect as it prompts me for a username and password, but doesn't allow me to view the ftp site in Windows Explorer. I have also attempted to get the ftp upload to work in Firefox but with no sucess. One thing new to IE7 (I think Beta 3) is the following warning

when copying info. from the clipboard. I think this would get annoying after a while.

I downloaded IE7 beta 2 onto my machine last week and thought I'd test it by clicking on a link in an email I knew to be suspect (allegedly from Barclays). After clicking on the link, IE7 bought up the following screen.

I was impressed by this, but after navigating to another (non suspect site) was informed that the phishing service was temporarily offline.

Nathan Weinberg has a play with the latest version of IE7 Beta 2

http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/01/23/internet-explorer-7-beta-2-preview/

I was looking at Windows desktop search this morning

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/default.mspx

or if you want the toolbar as well

http://toolbar.msn.com/

Google have released this in the last few days

http://pack.google.com/

The pack includes (I've only looked at the things I will use day to day)

• Mozilla Firefox

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

I use this for aggregating RSS feeds via the Sage plugin.

http://sage.mozdev.org/

RSS isn't natively supported in IE6, although you may be able to use a tool such as

http://rssexplorer.planet-hood.com/

along with a news aggregator.

IE7 will have better support for RSS

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/02/446280.aspx

• AdAware SE Personal

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/

I used this a while ago before AntiSpyware came out

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=321CD7A2-6A57-4C57-A8BD-DBF62EDA9671&displaylang=en

• Norton AntiVirus 2005 Special Edition

6 month subscription - not sure how much after that. The Microsoft equivalent is still in beta

http://safety.live.com/site/en-US/scanner/wlscEula.htm?safety&/site/en-US/center/howsafe.htm

• Google desktop

This enables you to search for anything on your machine (emails, photos etc) from one place. The link for the MS equivalent (Windows Desktop) is above.

 

If I were Microsoft I would be getting concerned. Although there is nothing here that stands out over it's MS equivalent, the fact that you can download it as one coherent package is more than Microsoft are able to offer at the moment. If I were MS, I would be pushing "Windows Live" more, and placing all these offering under the "Live" banner.

http://www.live.com/

I will be downloading Windows desktop search this evening to discover how efficient it is.